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Dienstag, 21. März 2017

Using a GPS phone application such as Waze allows you to shorten the driving time: it can take the driver off a congested road and guide him by detours to where the traffic flows again on the main road. However, not everyone is happy with the result.

Two groups are most affected: residents of residential neighborhoods who at peak times see a parade of cars on their quiet roads until recently and urban planners who coordinate traffic lights and pedestrian crossings according to patterns that no longer exist.

USA Today summarized the story in an example. The city of Fremont in California is north of San Jose and is traversed by two eternally overcrowded highways: 880 and 680. "Do not rely on your apps!" Said a new traffic sign. "With frequently congested roads, navigation applications such as Apple Maps or Waze began to tell drivers to take off at Fremont Boulevard Mission, through residential streets, and then back to the road where it was lighter, to the great distress of The people who live there, "the US newspaper said.

To make drivers take less time, Waze, Apple Maps and other GPS applications use all streets, and that means detours in residential neighborhoods Phone Tracker

While the programs that use the global positioning system (GPS) take into account the characteristics of the residential areas, so as not to be the first option in the event of a traffic jam, its final purpose is to use all possible roads, because all Citizens have the right to use all streets even if it is only to decongest a route.

"The result is that frustration builds up in cities, which are trying to disrupt computer systems," according to the newspaper.

Fremont tried the friendly way: his main transportation engineer, Noe Veloso, contacted Waze, who is part of Google. Then the city instituted bans of rotation in the most used residential routes, that apply only during the rush hour. He finally teamed up with Waze in the Connected Citizens Program, which shares data and information - including places where it can not be folded - although the urban planner is not very convinced of the durability of the results. Waze is likely to divert traffic to other neighborhoods.

"Fremont's situation unfolds in other towns and cities in the United States, and municipal planners are just beginning to understand the scope of the challenge," according to USA Today. The media quoted Sam Schwartz, a former New York transit coordinator and author of a book forerunner of these programs, on short cuts in the big city: "Waze and Uber beat urban planners so quickly we did not know what to do."

Cities and urban planners respond to Waze turn-bys with changes in the direction of the streets and roundabouts. But the results are uncertain. (The Washington Post)
Cities and urban planners respond to Waze turn-bys with changes in the direction of the streets and roundabouts. But the results are uncertain. (The Washington Post)
For Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Boston's chief information officer, "this will be just the tip of the iceberg." His pessimism is based on the fact that for now drivers use GPS applications only for certain trips: infrequent journeys, for example. But to the extent that mapping integrates with automotive technology, or when cars without drivers are common, detours will be massive. "We can not force the creator of an application to include community goals in it," he said.

Boston uses Waze to synchronize the traffic lights in the city center. According to the company, the collaboration allowed the local government to cut congestion by 18% in a month. But the fundamental opposition between cartographic services and cities is much deeper.http://gps-phonetracker.net/
"In the conflict between getting someone to get there quickly versus neighbors who are upset about the traffic, Waze's commitment is with the drivers," Mark Hallenbeck, director of the Washington State Transportation Center, told the US newspaper. If it was not, he said, drivers "would use Apple Maps or TomTom."

The consensus among urban planners is geared towards changing streets. Motorists no longer notice difference between driving at 25 miles (40 kilometers) per hour and 40 miles (65 kilometers), as the engines are increasingly quieter. But if a street is one-way, for example, the algorithms do not take them into account to alleviate the traffic of the roads.

The city of Seattle began with the installation

Aragon is a natural paradise and also a land of cinema, but not even the toughest filmmaker should stop taking into account the dangers of the mountain or stop being guided by the Film Commission that recently pushed the DGA. Well know the group of fans of the seventh art who, last Thursday, had to be rescued in the Sierra Monegrina for not taking due precautions when facing a tour.

According to the Guardia Civil, the group was made up of two women and one man, who had come to the Sierra de Jubierre to look for locations for a short film. But so absorbed were they in the scene that they went on the night.

The voice of alert was given late Thursday afternoon by a companion of stray filmmakers, who had been informed through a telephone message that they did not know how to continue their journey in the dark.

The members of this group, coming from Catalonia, communicated to their friend that they did not know where they were, that they lacked flashlights and that they had hardly any battery in their mobile phones, so they could not facilitate their position via GPS to Facilitate their location.

Several agents of the posts of the towns of Novales and Sariñena, including two who were free of service but who knew the area, began a search for the mountains with lanterns and warm clothing with which to cope with the intense cold that Is usually recorded in this area at night time.
After tracking the sierra for an hour, the agents heard shouts coming from a nearby ravine where they were lost, to whom they provided warm clothes before proceeding to their transfer.

The immediacy with which the search was carried out, the Civil Guard said, allowed the group members to be rescued before midnight. All were unharmed and, although they had a strong feeling of cold, they had a happy ending.